I've had xampp installed on my Vista box for over a year and it has generally worked fine. I added a couple of new virtual hosts and some other tweaks a few days ago, and things were still working fine. Now suddenly I can't get any PHP scripts to load, and I don't see any errors that lead me in the direction of the problem.

More specifically, I'm running Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5. When I start Apache and MySQL through the xampp control panel, both start without error. If I point my browser to http://localhost/index.html I can see the static page. But if I go to http://localhost/index.php, I get a Windows dialog box that says "Apache HTTP server has stopped working".

The system Event logs don't reveal anything that I can see. There is an error, but nothing specific about what has gone wrong. The apache error log shows this:

I've been struggling with this for a bit now and am not sure how to diagnose the problem. Any suggestions? The php.exe seems to run fine from the command line, but PHP scripts all crash Apache when accessed from my browser.

I had a very long frustrating time with this issue and found no answer anywhere. Finally I tracked it down to the fact that I had another version of PHP installed on the computer. When I removed PHP, then removed XAMPP, restarted and then re-installed XAMPP everything finally worked. Hope this helps someone.

joes_k wrote:Finally I tracked it down to the fact that I had another version of PHP installed on the computer. When I removed PHP, then removed XAMPP, restarted and then re-installed XAMPP everything finally worked.

Not so much another instance of php that would have caused your issue but another php.ini file in the Windows folder perhaps and/or a path variable pointing to your other instance of php in the Environment Variables or this SetEnv PHPRC "path" System Environment Variable or in a registry entry perhaps.

After uninstalling XAMPP and reinstalling it (xampp-win32-1.7.0-installer.exe) and applying the xampp-patch2-win32-1.7.0-installer, I still have the problem of the PHP CLI closing and throwing the pop-up dialog.

I was able to find the following files in the c:\xampp\apache\bin and c:\xampp\php directories. Both of these files already existed; libmysql_5.0.51a.dll and an existing copy of libmysql.dll. So, in order to rename the longer one 'mysql.dll,' I had to first delete the existing file by that name and then rename the longer one. This did not solve the problem after restarting the services and trying the Windows CMD line again.

You sir, are The Man! Nicely done. Thank you for the perseverance. With the last changes, I am good to go, and looking forward to putting this robust stack to good work.With regards and appreciation,Stephen